Re: NEC Licence (Work of US Gov. Employees)

[Bruce Perens <bruce@va.debian.org>]

From: Jonathan P Tomer <jpt@cif.rochester.edu>
> for instance, you could grab any us government produced software and gpl it
> (or whatever lese you like) for a debian package.

Yes. I guess you've discussed what I did with the U.S. map data.

> if i'm wrong here, and it has to stay in pd or some such, then a copyright
> file with "this work is a product of the us government, and as such is not
> copyrighted; anyone may use, modify, and distribute it in any way."

The single sentence "This work is in the public domain." should suffice.
All of the rest is implied from that. You can add a disclaimer of warranty,
but you can't keep anyone from deleting that and then redistributing the
result (because it's public domain). However, it's very doubtful that anyone
is going to be sued over an implied warranty claim on PD software, especially
if the copy _they_ distributed included a warranty disclaimer.

If you are the author and want your work to be in the public domain, use
"I abandon my copyright and place this work in the public domain. <author's
name>, <date>."

	Thanks

	Bruce